..

Thursday, 1 September 2011

I got a new blog

Fresh start.

http://himynameischardy.blogspot.com/

Thursday, 10 March 2011

These are 2 of 6 20x20 inch squares I did for a brief in composition, taking five elements (line, picture, block of colour, number/letter and text) and making one of them more prominent than the others and in one square making them all equal. I liked this brief because I like composition, these 2 are obviously making the text and picture stand out.

Obfuscate

This is a shite photo but this was part of the 3D typography brief. I photocopied black ink on acetate and then scratched around the word "obfuscate" so it would kind of illustrate the meaning of the work (means you can't read/see it very well, to render unclear) and it didn't really become a piece of work until I put both parts on top of each other, because I'd just had them side by side but it looked shit, but I think it works really well as a piece like this, and illustrates the meaning even more.

Kraken Egg

Right so this started off as just a lino print in exploratory stage and then one day I found it and my tutor was like ooh that looks like a book so I made it into a kinda Penguin book cover for The Kraken Wakes cos it's like a larl egg on it's own and you dunno what it could turn into and it'll end up being a massive kraken. Although it was meant to be a penguin egg when I did it. But anyway, I love the way the yellow print is at a slightly off angle to the blue so I decided to incorporate this into my title but not a lot of people got this and were like eh why you doing the writing at a weird angle but actually the yellow text is over the blue text at the same angle the yellow print is over the blue print. Also when I scanned the print in it scanned the kind of crinkly paper in too but I decided to keep this because it kind of represents a book that's been read a lot. If that makes sense.

Typography Rule Break

Pure love this one 'cos I wasn't really paying attention to what I was doing. I had a few lines of lyrics typed out and put both the kerning and leading to to least possible and it looked fairly cool, so I reduced the transparency and copied the layer and placed it's copy just off it. So I suppose this one breaks the legible rule, the kerning and leading rule and probably a few more.

This one went through a few phases because it didn't really feel right:

At first I have the "You make me wanna die" on the side on different lines but I didn't really like it, although it was breaking the heading rule. I liked the lyrics from the verses on the left hand side where i'd set the leading to the lowest possible and therefore breaking the leading/kerning rule, and as you can see I kept increasing the amount of words so it came further down the page, and eventually right the way down. The lyrics in the middle are the kind of bridge into the chorus so I put them on the golden section. Eventually I made the "You make me wanna die" all on one line right to the sides of the page because I really liked the zig-zag shapes that the letters made.

I wanted to reverse the black and white theme I had going so that the white letters were almost cut out the black background instead of being black letters on white. To give this effect I bulged out the Frankly, and mis-aligned the "N" to break the baseline rule, and also cut it all off the page just because I liked the way it looked. I lined the Mr. Shankly up with the end of the N and K because I'm obsessive and started to add more lyrics to break the line length rule. I felt there was too much space at the bottom so moved the lyrics to the bottom to include the black space in the poster, and then tried to kind of illustrate the meanings of a couple of the words for example decreased the kerning on "corrode" and moved "down" down a line.

Doubt 2

Re-did the Doubt Love piece because it wasn't in line and it was pissing me of so I laid it out with just the letters so everything was lined up etc and then added the paint strokes.

I like this one because it's kind of ambiguous depending on how much you you read of it, as at first glance it looks like it's saying "Doubt Love" but in fact it's saying the opposite but you have to read the rest of the text to figure that out.

Wednesday, 8 December 2010

Doubt

I woke up in the woods covered in blood. Which means I am either crazy or a werewolf, but I'm not a nobody.

Love this quote so I was just messing about on photoshop with it.

Thursday, 2 December 2010

Breaking Typography Rules

We got 10 rules of typography and we had to break them. I loved this as I always want to break the rules, so I immediately wanted to jump the gun and make a poster breaking every single rule, then I thought I should take the time to break a few at a time, because by breaking them you learn to understand them, and I found out some really good ways to break the rules that make them look better than when you abide by them, which is just plain boring.

So my A3 poster, using song lyrics. I used All Signs Point To Lauderdale by A Day To Remember 'cos i've been listening to it none stop since I got their new album. This poster shows me breaking the rules of: putting the header large and at the top of the page, never using all capitals in the main body of text, never use over 8pt or 10pt for main body text and subtly applying stress onto certain words. So, obviously to break these rules, I placed the header at an angle near the bottom of the page, made all the main body of text in capitals, made the font size of the main body text over 10pt, and put a ridiculous and completely unsubtle amount of stress on the necessary parts:

I looked at this and because I'm a perfectionist I wanted every part to be where it looked best, so I needed to make a couple of changed to this. I wasn't sure that I liked the way the last two letters of the "THAT" and "FIT" don't quite fit into the "2," even though there is some irony there which I quite like. I changed the size of this opening verse/chorus so that it didn't overlap the 2.

I also thought the kerning needed to be changed so when I edited it I changed it to -75 and I think it looks way better. The letters in the inside of the top of the 2 was annoying me because I wanted it to look like it was layered onto the other side of the numbers, and taking this into account meant there should not be letters on left side of the letters, so I changed this too; I also brought the main body text down to the bottom of the 2 as I think it looked like it flowed more instead of being cut off like on the one immediately above.

To me it kind of looks like the top right part has been teared off and the rest is on a page in front of it. I love the boldness of the numbers and I put stress on these parts because at the end of the opening on the verse in the song it counts to 4 and I made the numbers get bigger because the singer shouts each number louder.

Wednesday, 1 December 2010

I LOVE this guy's posters.

have a deeks: http://www.ibraheemyoussef.com/work.html

Buy Nothing Day

Right so this was a brief to try and advertise and persuade the public to not spend money on the 27th November, as it's Buy Nothing Day. I'm a stubborn larl bastard and I knew that if somebody told me to day this by giving me a flyer or showing me a poster I wouldn't do it, it'd have to be something I went away and looked into myself.

Keeping this in mind I decided to make it so that the poster/leaflet's purpose was to get people to look on the website and read about it themselves, and then decide wether they liked the ideas behind it (www.buynothingday.co.uk) and whether they would want to contribute.

Also taking into consideration that there must be more stubborn people out there than me, I decided to create the slogan "I Double Dare You" because if I'm ever dared to do something, I'll want to do it just to spite the person who dared me. So all I included on my posters was that slogan and the website, so people would see the "dare" and be intrigued by it and go on it, and form their own opinion.

Anyway, here are my final ideas.

This is like the 5th one of these because I wasn't happy with the first ones and I don't really like this one that much but I do like the way the orange and the yellow on the card and scissors stand out because they're in focus and rest isn't, I think it looks quite good. I experimented with the text down along the bottom and up the side and ended up with it just like this.

Then I went onto photoshop and decided just to mess about with text and colour.

Right so this one was basically just Helvetica (<333) in really bold text with the website in red, so it's eye-catching and so the viewer knows that's it's additional information to the dare that they know nothing about (YET!).

I changed the kerning of the text because it is not until I found out about kerning that I realised how horrible looking the default text is on computers.

Below is the same font, colours etc but I added a white brush to it, giving it an almost mysterious effect. Kind of. I thought this looked quite cool and it adds to the whole unknown dare thing:

The one below was just an idea that came to me when I'd ran out of ideas with the black and red. I like the way it's quite in your face and busy and then at the bottom in the white space there's just the website. I originally had the red at the bottom in the middle but it didn't stand out enough so I made it smaller and put it in a blank white space:

I used the green and grey that www.buynothingday.co.uk uses for these:

I think the top one looks like some sort of xbox advert. I like the bottom one because I think the green just looks really nice with the grey.

I think although there is only one bit of text and it is in the bottom right, it looks really effect because the way I view it is that people read from lift to right and top to bottom, so if you have a basically blank page but then something across the bottom, (especially the bottom right) then the viewer will take in the whole page, because that is the way their eye automatically views things, rather than placing it at the top of the page with nothing underneath, as there eye won't take in the rest of the page.

Saturday, 27 November 2010

These are pure cute

http://blog.oneplusinfinity.com/?p=5742

Tuesday, 23 November 2010

Bored. So did these...

Started off doing this basic piece of crap:

Muddled up the letters of my name in big black letters and put them so it was barely recognisable and then wrote my name in white font and layered it on top of the rest. It is an ok starting point I suppose but it's too round for my liking, needs to me messed up a bit, but I like the way the white font against the white background basically creates shapes in the black and you don't have to see them as letters if you look close enough.

So the previous design ended up like this. I created a later behind the original layer and used loads of different scruffy type brushes until I found some that made it look right and balanced (in a way). Also there's a few smoother strokes in there which I thought looked quite good in a juxtaposed way.

So THEN. I did this (which I fairly love):

Did the same as I did with the bigger black letters spelling out my name, but this time I angled them so it gave the outline sharper points etc. Added white and also grey brush strokes which I think makes it look quite cool. I took ages figuring out how to put the white letters and ended up spelling out "CHARDYKATEMILLER" (my name obv) and did one so it made plenty of nice shapes in the black layers behind it, and then I copied the layer, made it bigger and flipped it upside down and just kinda layers it above/on top of it. Added another "CHARDYKATEMILLER" in black and smaller at the bottom right (golden section waheyy) because it made me think of a logo type thing and I thought it might be good for people looking at it to see what it actually says because it's not as clear as the first one I did.

Then I kept looking at it and thought it needed something extra to frame it: